Life After Medicine

Science

12/09/2017

The 7yo and 9yo went back to school last week, and I still feel bereft. It's the time of year where almost every parent I know puts a happy picture of their smiling children in their school uniform in front of the front door on Facebook, often with a comment as to how relieved they are that the holidays are over. I can remember feeling relieved at the end of the summer holidays in years gone by, but this year I was dreading the day I had to take the kids back to school. I really enjoyed spending so much time with them over the six-week holiday.

The kids were delighted not to have to go to any childcare over the summer, but I did have to manage their expectations somewhat. Having a career break has been really good for me (as well as completely necessary), but it has meant that I have had to reduce my spending considerably, and that my disposable income is now negligible. So this year there was to be no foreign holiday, no trip to legoland, and very few fancy days out.

With those points in mind, at the beginning of the summer we sat all the children down and asked them what activities they would like to do. I wrote them all down on a list, and then we each got some coloured card triangles to write down our items on. I stuck these triangles up on the stairs, to look like bunting:

I also printed off some coloured ticks on some stickers, so that we could mark off the activities as we completed them. We did not promise to do all of the activities, but we did say that we would try to do as many of them as we could. Within the first week we had ticked off 'swimming', 'make homemade pizza' and 'watch a movie', and the kids loved putting the stickers on the triangles as we completed things.

Two of the kids wanted to go to the Natural History Museum and the other wanted to go to the Science Museum, so we ended up visiting both in one day, which was brilliant, if exhausting. Whenever I go to the Natural History Museum I can't resist taking a photo of Charles Darwin's statue:

All of the children wanted to do camping as one of their activities. We weren't able to fit in a full camping holiday this year, but luckily they were happy to do this in someone's garden, and in the end we managed 4 nights in two separate gardens (grandparents and cousins). The tiny tent in the photo was for the 9yo's benefit, so he could have his own space, and he loved it.

We also managed to fit in a trip to the beach (to the not terribly exotic Great Yarmouth), inviting friends over for sleepovers, making homemade ice-cream, baking chocolate chip cookies and chocolate muffins, completing the Summer Reading Challenge, countless trips to the park, and many happy hours playing with toys. There was some crafting too, with Hama Beads being a particular favourite:

Alongside all the toys and craft activities, the kids also did some rather lovely role play games together, including one evening where they decided that they would be our waiters for dinner. We cooked the dinner as normal, and the kids laid the table, made place cards and menus, and served our food to us. Hopefully by next summer they can do the same, but make the dinner as well..

All in all, we had a fabulous summer, so when it was time to take the traditional 'back to school' photo I was quite sad. It's an important ritual though, so we took the obligatory photos of the 9yo and 7yo in front of the front door anyway. The 5yo is home educated, so didn't need a 'going back to school' photo. Instead we took a 'not going back to school' photo of her in front of the door. I don't do kids' faces on social media (or on the blog), so I also took a picture of all our shoes on the first day of term. The 9yo has shot up over the summer, and his feet are now bigger than my partner's feet, and nearly as big as mine, so it's not that easy to tell which shoes belong to who in this photo:

I budgeted to have a year off when I left my job, so I now have 3 months left. That means that I am actively looking for work now, but I have resolved to only look for part-time work, so that I can spend as much time as possible with my lovely, funny, exasperating, fabulous, exhausting and brilliant children while they are still young.